In contrast to the above AOL/HuffingtonPost/AP puff piece, here's a
real assessment of what Holder has done to the nation as Attorney General:
ERIC HOLDER'S LEGACY: The Attorney General used Justice's power for a divisive agenda.People who complain about gridlock in Washington don't generally mention the Department of Justice. But Thursday's announcement that Eric Holder plans to resign as Attorney General allows us to examine some of the substantive causes of Washington's bitter divisions.
One would be hard put to identify an Attorney General who so explicitly turned the Justice Department into a political weapon, and for an office occupied by Bobby Kennedy and John Mitchell, that is saying something.
The financial settlements that Holder Justice squeezed out of major banks are Exhibit A. Massive fines were imposed on J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America explicitly as punishment for the 2008 financial crisis. No matter how unprovable the charges, the banks settled because they couldn't endure the continuing political risk of even more severe punishment. President Obama bragged about punishing financial institutions throughout his 2012 re-election campaign.
When distinct legal questions about the destruction of emails pertaining to the Internal Revenue Service tax-exempt bias against conservative groups were transferred to Mr. Holder's Justice Department, they disappeared into the bureaucratic ethers. He also managed the unique feat of being declared in contempt of Congress.
Mr. Holder also turned Justice into a routine instrument of social and racial policy. Under the former head of the Civil Rights Division, Thomas Perez (now Secretary of Labor), Justice used "disparate impact" analysis to force racial adjustments on cities, police and fire departments and banks. The settlements were not based on proven racial discrimination, as traditionally required, but on arcane statistical analyses.
Among Mr. Holder's worst overreaches was filing suit last year to block Louisiana's private-school voucher program. That program overwhelmingly helps the state's poorest minority families escape bad schools. No matter, Justice's statistical cops said the program was unbalancing the "racial identity" of public schools by admitting too many black children into better schools.
In July 2012 the Attorney General invoked the specter of Jim Crow amid a presidential campaign. In a speech to the NAACP, he likened voter ID laws to "poll taxes," an argument rejected by the Supreme Court in 2009.
As a footnote, don't forget Mr. Holder's unprecedented investigations of journalists, such as Associated Press writers and Fox News reporter James Rosen, under the Espionage Act.
We assume President Obama will nominate a successor who will continue the politicized Holder legacy. That subject deserves a full airing in Senate confirmation hearings. Mr. Holder has used his department's formidable power to pursue a political agenda that is polarizing and vindictive.
Even the timing of his resignation is politically driven, coming before the midterm elections so that Senate Democrats in the lame-duck session that reconvenes in November can confirm Mr. Holder's successor with 51 votes. The new Attorney General will be the product of Senator Harry Reid's "nuclear option." The Holder era will be known as one in which politics usually trumped the law.
